The invention relates to electronic printers and printing systems, and more particularly, to a file storage process for such systems.
An important task of the operating system in an electronic printing system is the maintenance of files which are permanent objects recorded on backing storage such as hard disks. A file consists of a sequence of pages, the contents of which must be preserved across system restarts. The file system provides the operating system with facilities for creating, organizing, reading, writing, modifying, copying, moving, deleting, and controlling access to the files. Since certain files are critical, it is desirable to have a fail-safe system for preserving these files in the event one of the hard disks fails. Otherwise, if the failed disk needs to be replaced, the files on the disk are lost. At the same time, it is desirable to enhance the effectiveness and speed for writing and reading of files to and from the disks and to facilitate the loading of new or upgraded software to the disks.